Motivational Quotes

Wisdom

Wisdom is perishable. Unlike information or knowledge, it cannot be stored in a computer or recorded in a book. It expires with each passing generation.

- Taylor, Sid

Best Quotes about Wisdom

The wise person has long ears and a short tongue.

Proverb, German

The wisest have the most authority.

Plato

If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.

Buscaglia, Leo

Wisdom is knowledge, rightly applied.

Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually marked by an ill placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite.

Levenson, Samuel

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Butler, Samuel

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Bacon, Francis

Wisdom overcomes fortune.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

10.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

Quarles, Francis

11.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Basho, Matsuo

12.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

Hoffer, Eric

14.

A wise man never knows all, only fools know everything

Proverb, African

15.

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Blake, William

16.

A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult.

Collins, John Churton

17.

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.

Smiles, Samuel

18.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

19.

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.

Watson, Thomas J.

20.

Who is a wise man? He who learns of all men.

Talmud, The

21.

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

Sophocles

22.

Great men are the commissioned guides of mankind, who rule their fellows because they are wiser.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

Among mortals second thoughts are wisest.

Euripides

24.

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

Thurber, James

25.

Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

Brecht, Bertolt

26.

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.

Covey, Stephen R.

29.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

31.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all your getting get understanding.

Bible

32.

A nation's treasure is its scholars.

Proverb, Yiddish

33.

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd preferred to talk.

Larson, Doug

34.

Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. [1 Corinthians 3:18-19]

Bible

35.

Some folks are wise and some otherwise.

Billings, Josh

36.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war. [9:18b, Ecclesiastes]

Bible

37.

Understanding the limitations of human beings as well as understanding your own is the beginning of true wisdom.

38.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, --something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

Connolly, Cyril

41.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

Edmund Burke

42.

Even though you know a thousand things, ask the man who knows one.

Proverb, Turkish

43.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

44.

A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.

Rowland, Helen

45.

Through wisdom is a house built; and by understanding it is established; and by knowledge shall every room be filled with precious and pleasant riches.

Bible

46.

Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.

Kraus, Karl

47.

He who exercises wisdom exercises the knowledge which is about God.

Epictetus

48.

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Freud, Sigmund

49.

By the time your life is finished, you will have learned just enough to begin it well.

Marx, Eleanor

50.

Many people might have attained wisdom had they not assumed they already had it.